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WILLIAM    JAMES   AND 
PEAGMATISM 


BY 


ETHEL  ERNESTINE  SABIN 

B.A.  University  of  Wisconsin,  1908 
M.A.  University  of  Wisconsin,  1914 


THESIS 

Submitted  in  Partial  Fulfillment  of  the  Requirements  for  the 

Degree  of  Doctor  of  Philosophy  in  Philosophy 

in  the  Graduate  School  of  the 

University  of  Illinois 

1916 


i  OB  YU% 


PRESS  OF 

THE  NEW  ERA  PRINTING  COMPANY 

LANCASTER,  PA. 


WILLIAM    JAMES   AND 
PKAGMATISM 


BY 


ETHEL  ERNESTINE  SABIN 

B.A.  University  of  Wisconsin,  1908 
M.A.  University  of  Wisconsin,  1914 


THESIS 

Submitted  in  Partial  Fulfillment  of  the  Requirements  for  the 

Degree   of  Doctor  of  Philosophy  in  Philosophy 

in  the  Graduate  School  of  the 

University  of  Illinois 

1916 


PRESS  OF 

THE  NEW  ERA  PRINTING  COMPANY 

LANCASTER,  PA. 


4-S~ 


C^/^cX — cc*-*-< 


A_ 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 


Page 


Chapter  I.     Some  Difficulties  in  James's  Formulation  of  Prag- 
matism    1 

Chapter  II.     The  Question  of  Truth 16 

Appendix  :  Vita 30 


m 


PREFACE 

Among  laymen  it  is  unusual  to  find  any  discrimination  between 
pragmatism  and  the  philosophy  of  William  James.  Even  among 
trained  students  of  philosophy  there  is  often  little  distinction.  It  is 
peculiarly  necessary,  however,  that  this  distinction  should  be  made, 
for  the  impetus  which  William  James  gave  to  the  radical  empiricism, 
which  he  at  times  called  pragmatism,  is  not  yet  spent,  and  prag- 
matism in  consequence  is  still  growing  in  clearness  of  formulation  and 
richness  of  content.  It  is  moreover  a  commonplace  that  such  growth 
involves  changes. 

The  belief  that  the  changes  which  have  been  incident  to  the  devel- 
opment of  this  philosophy  are  of  utmost  significance  to  the  student 
of  present  philosophical  tendencies  led  me  to  undertake  an  analysis  of 
what  we  may  call  the  old  and  the  new  pragmatism,  or  the  pragmatism 
of  James  and  that  of  the  school  most  closely  associated  with  the  name 
of  Professor  John  Dewey. 

The  present  monograph  is  a  part  only  of  a  study  which  I  am 
making  of  the  entire  complex  relationship  of;  the  two  closely  allied 
philosophies,  and  yet  it  is  complete  in  itself,  for  in  discussing  the 
difficulties  inherent  in  James's  formulation  of  his  final  doctrine  of 
consciousness,  one  comes  upon  the  essential  difference  between  the 
old  pragmatism  and  the  new;  a  difference  from  which  the  other 
divergences — such  as  the  one  included  in  this  monograph  in  regard 
to  the  doctrine  of  truth — follow  as  by  corollary. 

I  consider  it  indicative  of  the  lasting  worth  and  sound  virtue  of 
James's  contribution  to  philosophical  thought  that  he  bequeathed  to 
his  immediate  successors  no  clear-cut  dogmas,  no  polished  philoso- 
phical system,  but  instead  the  inspiring  example  of  original  thinking, 
a  zeal  for  scientific  method,  and  a  revelation,  such  as  that  of  Socrates 
to  Athens,  of  the  value  for  ordinary  human  activity  of  correct  phil- 
osophical conceptions. 

I  owe  my  thanks  to  the  editors  of  The  Journal  of  Philosophy, 
Psychology,  and  Scientific  Methods  for  permission  to  reprint  Chapter 
I.  of  this  monograph  from  the  issue  of  June  6,  1918  (Vol.  XV,  No.  12) . 
To  the  graduate  school  of  the  University  of  Illinois,  and  especially 
to  the  department  of  philosophy  of  that  university,  I  am  indebted 
for  the  opportunity  to  undertake  this  study  and  to  pursue  it  with 
helpful  criticism  and  direction. 


CHAPTER  I 

Some  Difficulties  in  James's  Formulation  of  Pragmatism 

WITH  the  growing  importance  of  pragmatism  in  the  philosoph- 
ical arena,  there  arises  a  corresponding  need  for  a  clear 
understanding  of  it.  One  of  the  most  significant  attempts  at  self- 
definition  on  the  part  of  the  pragmatists  is  the  volume  called,  sug- 
gestively, Creative  Intelligence.  Its  title  calls  attention  to  the  pivo- 
tal position  of  the  definition  of  consciousness  in  this  philosophy, 
and  emphasizes  at  the  same  time  its  functional  nature. 

There  is  another,  and  a  very  important,  approach  which  may 
and  should  be  made  to  pragmatism,  and  that  is  an  approach  through 
the  philosophy  of  William  James.  In  studying  the  relationship  be-  \ 
tween  James  and  pragmatism,  there  is  need  for  careful  analysis  in 
order  to  discover  wherein  pragmatism  has  advanced  beyond  James's 
formulation  of  it.- 

It  is  my  hope  to  show  this  advance  in  regard  to  the  central  prob- 
lem of  consciousness,  and  for  this  purpose  I  shall  discuss  the  sug- 
gestiveness  of  James's  use  of  the  fringe;  his  inability,  however,  to 
escape  entirely  from  dualism,  which  asserted  itself  in  the  latter  essays 
as  well  as  in  the  Principles  of  Psychology ;  the  confusion  between 
truth  and  reality  which  invalidated  his  two  tests,  whereby  objects 
are  distinguished  from  thoughts ;  and  finally  his  return  to  sensa- 
tionalism in  the  guise  of  "pure  experience."  How  present-day 
pragmatism  escapes  these  pitfalls  of  dualism  by  the  insistence  upon  !  / 
consciousness  as  functional  is  the  opposite  side  of  the  picture  and 
the  moral  of  the  tale. 

As  early  as  1890  James  suggested  in  his  doctrine  of  the  fringe 
the  germinal  idea  that  there  is  in  conscious  experience  some  element 
of  indeterminateness,  some  need  for  reconstruction  of  the  given 
data — the  very  aspect  of  consciousness  which  the  authors  of  Crea- 
tive Intelligence  find  supremely  significant. 

i  This  study  was  undertaken  at  the  University  of  Illinois  under  the  direc- 
tion of  Professor  B.  H.  Bode. 

2  One  commonly  hears  it  said  that  the  name  pragmatism  is  outworn  and  that 
functionalism,  behaviorism,  instrumentalism  or  possibly  Deweyism,  are  more 
adequate  terms.  I  feel,  however,  that  historically,  for  in  its  short  existence  it 
has  made  history,  there  is  much  to  be  said  in  favor-  of  the  word  pragmatism. 

1 


2  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

The  pages  of  the  Psychology  in  which  James  discussed  the  na- 
ture of  the  fringe  are  too  familiar  to  call  for  direct  quotation.3  It 
will  be  remembered  that  James  spoke  of  the  fringe  as  "part  of  the 
object  cognized."  That  object  might  itself  be  a  problem,  a  gap,  and 
the  fringe  might  be  relations  of  "unarticulated  affinities."  The 
most  important  characteristic  of  the  fringe  is,  he  repeated,  "the 
mere  feeling  of  harmony  or  discord,  of  a  right  or  wrong  direction  in 
the  thought."4  This  conception  of  harmony  as  implying  growth  or 
progressive  development  of  the  object  of  thought  in  a  certain  direc- 
tion was  a  revolutionary  idea  for  1890.5  In  1918  it  still  needs  to  be 
explained. 

In  James's  later  thought,  the  fringe  as  harmony  or  discord  of 
direction  was  translated  into  the  phrase  ' '  continuity  of  experience, ' ' 
and  in  this  connection  reached  the  highest  development  James  ever 
gave  to  it.  Nowhere  did  James  state  the  truly  functional  nature  of 
relationships  so  clearly  and  so  unambiguously  as  in  his  reply  to  Mr. 
Bode's  criticism  of  his  doctrine  on  the  ground  that  it  implied  a 
necessary  transcendence  of  experience.6  In  reply  to  his  critic, 
James  said  that  the  objective  reference  contained  in  such  a  rela- 
tionship as  and  does  not  transcend  experience,  because  we  actually 
find  the  future  within  the  present  experience.  James's  own  words 
were:  "Radical  empiricism  alone  insists  upon  understanding  for- 
wards also,  and  refuses  to  substitute  static  concepts  of  the  under- 
standing for  transitions  in  our  moving  life.  A  logic  similar  to  that 
which  my  critic  seems  to  employ  here  should,  it  seems  to  me,  forbid 
him  to  say  that  our  present  is,  while  present,  directed  to  our  future, 
or  that  any  physical  movement  can  have  direction  until  its  goal  is 
actually  reached."7 

One  can  understand  how  James's  reiteration  that  "we  are  ex- 
pectant of  a  'more'  to  come,  and  before  the  'more'  has  come,  the 
transition  nevertheless  is  directed  towards  it,"8  may  appear  to  a 
reader  an  obvious  misuse  of  objective  reference,  and  so  indeed  it 
would  be,  were  it  not  that  James  had  insisted  in  this  connection  that  i 
it  is  a  fact  of  experience  that  the  future  is  found  within  the  present. ' 

s  Cf.  Principles  of  Psychology,  Vol.  I.,  p.  258  et  seq. 

4  Ibid.,  p.  261. 

5  The  fringe,  we  must  not  forget,  had  a  static  as  well  as  dynamic  aspect 
for  James.     It  was  a  "halo"  as  well  as  a  "tendency." 

e  Cf.  B.  H.  Bode,  Pure  Experience  and  the  External  World,  this  Journal, 
Vol.  II.,  p.  128,  and  James,  Essays  in  Eadical  Empiricism,  pp.  234-240. 
ilbid.,  238-239. 
s  Ibid.,  p.  237. 


JAMES'S  FORMULATION  OF  PRAGMATISM  3 

Here  James  is  one  with  the  pragmatists  of  to-day  whose  work  may 
be  regarded  primarily  as  expository  of  the  fact  which  James  here 
affirms. 

That  James  did  not  always  explain  objective  reference  thus  satis- 
factorily will  be  considered  in  the  course  of  this  review.  We  shall 
find  that  he  did  what  he  criticized  rationalists  for  doing :  he  treated 
experience  as  chopped  into  discontinuous  static  objects,  because  he 
dropped  the  future  reference  out  of  the  present.  The  force  of  his 
training  in  dualistic  modes  of  thinking  was  too  strong  even  for  his 
genius,  and  he  therefore  failed  to  be  wholly  consistent  with  his  own 
advanced  position. 

This  brings  us  to  a  consideration  of  the  position  which  James 
called  a  "modified  dualism."  It  was  for  James  only  another  way 
of  describing  the  object  with  its  fringe  of  relationships  and  the  im- 
portant truth  which  he  meant  to  emphasize  by  it  was  not  that  two 
realities  of  different  orders  of  existence  face  each  other  in  experi- 
ence, but  that  reality  may  function  in  two  ways,  now  as  thought  and 
now  as  thing.  By  good  right  is  James  high  in  the  esteem  of  prag- 
matists, for  thus  freshly  and  vigorously  envisaging  the  problem. 

This  modified  dualism,  which  is  the  theme  of  many  of  the  Essays 
in  Radical  Empiricism,  marked  a  distinct  advance  beyond  the  posi- 
tion taken  in  his  Principles  of  Psychology  in  regard  to  the  ' '  Stream 
of  Thought,"  for  he  no  longer  held  that  thoughts  and  things  be-/ 
longed  to  different  orders  of  existence,  but  said  instead  that  they  are! 
the  selfsame  piece  of  experience  taken  twice  over  in  different  con- 
texts, now  as  thought  and  now  as  thing.9  In  his  own  words  we  find : 
"My  thesis  is  that  if  we  start  with  the  supposition  that  there  is 
only  one  primal  stuff  or  material  in  the  world,  a  stuff  of  which  every- 
thing is  composed,  and  if  we  call  that  stuff  'pure  experience'  then 
knowing  can  easily  be  explained  as  a  particular  sort  of  relation  into 
which  parts  of  experience  may  enter.  The  relation  itself  is  a  part 
of  experience;  one  of  its  'terms'  becomes  the  subject  or  bearer  of 
the  knowledge,  the  knower,  the  other  becomes  the  object  known." 
Further  quotations  will  serve  to  make  his  meaning  clear.  He  wrote : 
"The  one  self -identical  thing  has  so  many  relations  to  the  rest  of 

9  Essays  in  Radical  Empiricism,  p.  4.  It  is  disconcerting  to  find  that 
James  added  a  footnote  at  this  point  to  this  effect:  "In  my  Psychology  I 
have  tried  to  show  that  we  need  no  knower  other  than  the  passing  thought." 
This  would  seem  to  indicate  that  he  felt  a  fundamental  agreement  between  the 
two  views  and  that  the  twenty  years  of  doubting  the  existence  of  consciousness 
as  an  entity,  of  which  he  spoke  at  the  beginning  of  the  essay,  had  not  made 
him  wholly  dissatisfied  with  his  earlier  dualism. 


4  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

experience  that  you  can  take  it  in  disparate  systems  of  association, 
and  treat  it  as  belonging  with  opposite  contexts.  In  one  of  these  con- 
texts it  is  your  field  of  consciousness ;  in  another  it  is  '  the  room  in 
which  you  sit, '  and  it  enters  both  contexts  in  its  wholeness,  giving  no 
pretexts  for  being  said  to  attach  itself  to  consciousness  by  one  of  its 
parts  or  aspects  and  to  outer  reality  by  another.  .  .  .  The  physical 
and  the  mental  operations  form  curiously  incompatible  groups.  As  a 
room,  the  experience  has  occupied  that  spot  and  had  that  environment 
for  thirty  years.  As  your  field  of  consciousness  it  may  never  have 
existed  until  now.  ...  In  the  real  world  fire  will  consume  it.  In 
your  mind,  you  can  let  fire  play  over  it  without  effect.  As  an  outer 
object  you  must  pay  so  much  a  month  to  inhabit  it.  As  an  inner 
content  you  occupy  it  for  any  length  of  time  rent  free.  If  in  short 
you  follow  it  in  the  mental  direction,  taking  it  along  with  events  of 
personal  biography  solely,  all  sorts  of  things  are  true  of  it  which 
are  false,  and  false  of  it  which  are  true,  if  you  treat  it  as  a  real  thing 
experienced,  follow  it  in  the  physical  direction  and  relate  it  to  asso- 
ciates in  the  outer  world."10 

Once  having  said  that  thoughts  and  things  are  not  different  (^/ 
forms  of  existence,  James  was  bound  to  make  the  further  explana- 
tion of  how,  then,  they  manage  to  separate  sharply  into  the  two  con- 
texts, the  thought,  or  personal  biography  context,  and  the  thing  con- 
text, formed  of  purely  physical,  and  non-biographical  relations.  We 
do  speak  of  thoughts  and  we  do  speak  of  things,  and  how  do  we 
make  the  distinction? 

We  know  his  answer,  namely  that  the  distinction  between  a 
thought  and* a  thing  is  a  dualism  based  upon  function.  Unfortu- 
nately the  precise  nature  of  this  functionalism  escaped  him,  and  the 
consequences  of  this  failure  were  momentous. 

James  offered  two  apparently  unrelated  explanations  of  the 
method  by  which  we  distinguish  between  thoughts  and  things.  The 
first  and  simplest  test  rests  upon  the  relative  stability  of  relation- 
ships and  might  suffer  translation  into  the  phraseology  of  the  Psy- 
chology as  harmony  or  lack  of  harmony  of  the  fringe.  Thus  accord- 
ing to  the  test  of  stability  we  are  able  to  distinguish  between  a  real 
room  and  a  thought  of  a  room,  because  the  real  room  has  stable 
relationships,  whereas  the  idea  of  the  room  has  not.  The  second 
functional  test,  upon  which  James  placed  much  emphasis,  is  that  the 
idea  leads  us  toward  reality :  the  idea  of  the  room,  for  instance,  en- 
ables us  to  reach  the  room.  Here  we  see  the  feeling  of  direction,  so 
■•■»  ■   '  ■  • 

10  Ibid.,  pp.  12-15. 


JAMES'S  FORMULATION  OF  PRAGMATISM  5 

characteristic  of  the  fringe,  now  fully  developed  into  actual  guid- 
ance, as  expressed  in  terms  of  behavior.  Let  us  examine  each  of 
these  tests  in  turn. 

When  we  examine  the  first  we  find  much  plausibility  in  it. 
Every  one  will  admit  that  real  knives  will  cut  real  sticks,  and  will 
admit  no  less  readily  that  a  little  boy's  most  vivid  thought  of  a  knife 
has  never  yet  cut  a  willow  whistle.  In  the  boy's  dreams  the  knife 
may  or  may  not  fashion  the  coveted  whistle,  but  in  the  world  of 
things  a  certain  knife  applied  in  a  certain  way  produces  a  definitely 
calculable  result.  It  was  this  certainty  of  result  which  led  James  to 
speak  of  "the  stubborn,  cohesive,  and  permanent  relationships"11 
which  constitute  the  context  of  what  we  know  as  things.  This  sta- 
bility inevitably  comes  to  be  contrasted  with  the  unstable  relation- 
ships, fleeting  as  dreams,  which  constitute  the  context  of  what  we' 
know  as  thoughts.  Thus  James  said,  once  more  using  the  room  as  an 
example:  "The  room  thought-of,  namely,  has  many  thought-of 
couplings  with  many  thought-of  things.  Some  of  these  couplings 
are  inconstant,  others  are  stable.  In  the  reader's  personal  history 
the  room  occupies  a  single  date — he  saw  it  only  once  perhaps,  a  year 
ago.  Of  the  house's  history,  on  the  other  hand,  it  forms  a  perma- 
nent ingredient.  Some  of  the  couplings  have  the  curious  stubborn- 
ness, to  borrow  Eoyce's  term,  of  fact,  others  show  the  fluidity  of 
fancy,  we  let  them  come  and  go  as  we  please.  .  .  .  The  two  collections, 
first  of  its  cohesive  and  second  of  its  loose  associates,  inevitably  come 
to  be  contrasted.  We  call  the  first  collection  the  system  of  external 
relations,  in  the  midst  of  which  the  room  as  real  exists,  the  other  we 
call  the  stream  of  our  internal  thinking,  in  which  as  a  mental  image 
it  for  a  moment  floats.  "u  > 

James  realized,  as  others  had  not,  T.  H.  Green,  for  example,  who 
considered  unalterableness  the  test  of  reality,13  that  to  name  the  re- 
lationships of  things  coherent,  stable,  or  unalterable,  in  distinction 
to  the  relationships  of  thoughts,  was  merely  to  state  the  problem. 
The  terms  unalterableness  and  stability  needed  explanation  them- 
selves, and  as  James  saw,  this  explanation  could  be  given  only  in 
functional  terms.  Accordingly  he  translated  stability  of  relation- 
ship into  its  equivalent  in  terms  of  behavior,  saying  that  we  sift  out 
the  "real"  from  the  "mental"  objects  because  with  real  objects 
"Consequences  always  accrue."14    As  many  critics  of  pragmatism 

11  Ibid.,  pp.  21,  22  ff. 

12  Ibid.,  pp.  21-22. 

i3  Cf.  T.  H.  Green,  Prolegomena:  The  Spiritual  Principle  in  Nature,  p.  24. 
^Essays  in  Radical  Empiricism,  p.  33. 


^ 


V 


6  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

have  followed  James  in  believing  that  this  is  indeed  the  real  meaning 
of  functionalism,  it  will  be  well  for  us  to  understand  what  James 
meant  when  he  said  that  when  we  deal  with  real  objects  "conse- 
quences always  accrue."  Taking  a  pen  as  an  example  of  the  appli- 
cation of  the  functional  criterion,  he  writes:  "To  get  classed  either 
as  a  physical  pen  or  as  some  one's  percept  of  a  pen,  it  must  assume 
a  function,  and  that  can  only  happen  in  a  more  complicated  world. 
So  far  as  in  that  world  it  is  a  stable  feature,  holds  ink,  marks  paper 
and  obeys  the  guidance  of  a  hand,  it  is  a  physical  pen.  That  is 
what  we  mean  by  being  physical  in  a  pen.  So  far  as  it  is  instable, 
on  the  contrary,  coming  and  going  with  the  movements  of  my  eyes, 
altering  with  what  I  call  my  fancy,  continuous  with  subsequent  ex- 
perience of  its  'having  been'  (in  the  past  tense),  it  is  the  percept  of 
a  pen  in  my  mind.  These  peculiarities  are  what  we  mean  by  being 
conscious."15 

The  example  is  apparently  definite  enough  and  simple  enough, 
yet  one  soon  finds  that  its  meaning  is  far  from  clear.  One  explana- 
tion of  the  example  may  be  that  James  considered  the  stable  rela- 
tionships constitutive  of  reality  as  existing  between  objects  inde- 
pendent of  experience,  objects  which  form  the  subject-matter  of  the 
physical  sciences  for  instance,  but  which,  as  soon  as  brought  into 
relationship  with  an  experiencing  organism,  become  mental  exist- 
ences. If  this  is  a  true  interpretation,  the  significance  of  the  func- 
tional test  is  gone  and  a  dualism  unmodified  and  dangerous  nulli- 
jfies  James's  effort  to  advance.  For  if  stable  relationships  can  exist 
f  only  outside  of  experience,  James,  no  less  than  the  idealist  or  the 
realist,  should  ascribe  thinghood  in  an  absolutistic  sense  to  a  world 
independent  of  experience.  Indeed,  the  logical  result  of  this  inter- 
pretation of  his  definition  of  reality  would  be  to  deny  that  reality 
ever  enters  into  experience,  for  it  would  mean  a  reinstatement  of  the 
belief  in  the  duality  of  the  real  and  the  apparent,  in  such  sense  that 
the  real  would  be  an  unmeasurable,  unapproachable  absolute,  a  be- 
lief which  was  repellent  to  James. 

It  may  puzzle  one  to  discover  that  James  listed  among  the  stable 
relationships  of  a  pen,  linking  it  with  reality,  "obeys  the  guidance 
of  a  hand,"  which  is  certainly  a  relationship  to  the  organism,  and 
listed  among  the  fluctuating  relationships  which  link  it  with  ideas, 
"coming  and  going  with  the  movements  of  my  eyes,"  which,  is  like- 
wise a  relationship  to  the  organism.  What  is  the  difference  between 
the  two  relationships,  that  of  the  pen  guided  by  the  hand  and  that 
is  iud.,  pp.  123-124. 


JAMES'S  FORMULATION  OF  PRAGMATISM 


of  the  pen  seen  or  not  seen  by  the  eyes  ?  Certainly  in  each  case  the 
conditions  governing  the  consequences  which  accrue  may  be  stated 
in  terms  of  the  physical  sciences.  The  laws  of  optics  are  no  more 
subjective  than  the  laws  of  pressure  and  resistance. 

It  is  the  next  item  in  the  list  which  offers  the  clue  to  the  criterion 
toward  which  James  should  have  worked.  He  spoke  of  the  pen's 
altering  with  one's  fancy  and  said  that  this  is  one  of  the  possible 
relationships  of  a  percept  of  a  pen.  It  is,  indeed,  but  the  reason  for 
this  cleavage  between  the  physical  and  the  psychical  James  appar- 
ently failed  to  grasp  fully.  He  limited  himself  to  judgments  in  re- 
trospect concerning  ' '  the  consequences  which  always  accrue, ' '  which 
is  indeed  one  way,  but  not  the  most  significant  way  in  which  we  dis- 
tinguish between  thoughts  and  things.  If,  in  retrospect,  we  find  that 
the  promise  of  fulfilment  made  by  any  object  of  experience  was  indeed 
"made  good," — if  the  promise  of  the  pen  to  mark  paper,  for  in- 
stance, was  carried  out,  we  continue  to  call  our  experience  an  experi- 
ence of  reality,  or  we  may  call  it  true,  but  if  in  retrospect  we  find 
that  the  promise  of  fulfilment  was  not  "made  good"  we  say  that  we 
merely  thought  it  was  a  pen,  but  that  our  idea  was  erroneous.  Now\ 
the  pragmatist  insists  that  this  is  only  a  secondary  interpretation 
of  stability  and  that  we  do  not  need  to  wait  for  a  judgment  in  retro- 
spect to  distinguish  between  thoughts  and  realities,  since  that  dis- 
tinction lies  at  the  very  heart  of  every  present  experience.  Just  in 
so  far  as  the  object  controlling  our  behavior  is  in  need  of  further 
reconstruction,  just  in  so  far  as  it  is  yet  undetermined,  in  so  far  as 
it  lacks  stability,  in  the  sense  of  guiding  behavior  by  a  clear  forecast 
of  the  future,  and  finally  just  in  so  far  as  these  inadequacies  are  in 
process  of  purposive  reconstruction,  just  in  so  far  are  we  conscious 
of  the  object;  in  other  words,  the  experience  as  indeterminate  is  a 
"thought."  James  was  quite  right  in  connecting  stability  with  ob- 
jectivity, for  real  objects  are  experience  as  determined,  as  furnishing 
a  basis  for  further  determinatiofi,  but  he  missed  the  full  significance 
of  stability  by  confusing  reality  with  truth. 

Thus  James  misused  the  functional  test  of  stability,  which  be- 
came in  his  hands  a  means  for  distinguishing  truth  from  error,  but 
not,  as  he  thought,  for  making  the  further  distinction  between  idea 
and  object.  If  I  try  to  warm  myself  by  putting  an  imaginary  log 
on  my  dying  fire,  consequences  of  a  satisfactory  nature  do  not,  it  is 
true,  follow,  although,  as  freezing  mortals  have  uniformly  testified, 
there  is  a  fatal  dependability  and  stability  about  the  consequences 
of  this  act.     There  was  ambiguity  in  James's  statement  of  his  prob- 


8  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

lem,  for  what  he  actually  meant  was  not  merely  a  thought  of  a  log 
as  opposed  to  a  real  log  in  such  a  case,  but  an  absent  log-as-promising- 
the-sanie-results,  as  a  present  log  promises.  Then  in  retrospect  he 
should  have  seen  that  whereas  one  promise  is  uniformly  fulfilled, 
the  other  is  not,  and  that  a  true  experience  is  thus  separated  from 

I  one  full  of  error.  Being,  we  must  assume,  unaware  of  this  am- 
biguity in  the  statement  of,  his  problem,  James  used  stability  as  a 
test  of  truth,  with  the  confident  assurance  that  he  was  using  it  as  a 
test  for  the  distinction  between  ideas  and  objects,  which,  as  we  have 
seen,  is  a  further  distinction  which  may  arise  from  an  experience  of 
error,  but  is  not  to  be  identified  with  it. 

The  second  test  by  which  he  proposed  to  distinguish  between  a 
thought  and  a  thing,  namely  the  character  of  experience  as  leading, 
brought  him  no  nearer  a  satisfactory  conclusion  because  it  rested  on 
the  same  fundamental  confusion  of  the  knowledge  of  the  reality  of 
an  object  with  the  knowledge  of  the  truth  of  a  judgment.  Here, 
again,  had  James  fully  realized  the  significance  of  his  doctrine  of  the 
fringe  in  respect  to  "the  future  within  the  present"  his  doctrine  of 
leading  might  easily  have  been  made  consistently  pragmatic.  But 
this  motivation  by  the  future  James  dropped  out  with  the  result  that 
his  doctrine  of  leading  became  essentially  unintelligible.  Yet  he 
worked  with  the  idea  so  long,  so  brilliantly  and  so  honestly,  that  it 
became  the  very  core  of  his  philosophy  and  the  foundation  of  his 
doctrine  of  truth.  It  is  the  key  to  the  proper  interpretation  of  his 
Essays  in  Radical  Empiricism  to  a  large  part  of  The  Pluralistic 
Universe  and  to  the  two  closely  allied  volumes  Pragmatism  and  The 
Meaning  of  Truth.  He  stated  the  position  in  its  simplest  terms  in 
speaking  of  the  knowing  of  perceptual  experiences.  "One  experi- 
ence would  be  the  knower,  the  other  the  reality  known ;  and  I  could 
perfectly  well  define  without  the  notion  of  'consciousness'  what  the 
knowing  actually  and  practically  amounts  to — leading  towards, 
namely,  and  terminating  in  percepts,  through  a  series  of  transitional 
experiences  which  the  world  supplies."16 

In  pursuance  of  this  conception  of  consciousness  he  said  that 
the  knower  and  the  known  are  either  (1)  "the  self -same  piece  of  ex- 
perience taken  twice  over  in  different  contexts;  or  they  are  (2)  two 
pieces  of  actual  experience  belonging  to  the  same  subject  with  defi- 
nite tracts  of  conjunctive  transitional  experience  between  them  or 
(3)  the  knower  is  a  possible  experience  of  that  subject  or  of  another, 
to  which  the  said  conjunctive  transitions  would  lead,  if  sufficiently 
prolonged. '  '17 

ie  Ibid.,  p.  25.  «  Ibid.,  p.  53. 


JAMES'S  FORMULATION  OF  PRAGMATISM     .        9 

It  was,  as  we  have  seen,  by  the  test  of  stability  of  relationships 
that  he  sought  to  determine  in  the  first  case  whether  the  self -same 
piece  of  experience  was  to  be  considered)  as  a  thing  or  as  a  thought. 
In  the  second  and  third  types  knowing  is  considered  as  a  transition, 
actual  or  possible,  from  one  piece  of  actual  experience  to  another. 
As  an  example  James  took  the  cognitional  relation  existing  between 
his  thought  of  Memorial  Hall  while  sitting  in  his  library  at  Cam- 
bridge, and  Memorial  Hall.  Again,  James's  explanation  missed  the 
significance  of  cognition  and  described  verification  in  its  stead.  He 
said:  "My  mind  may  have  before  it  only  the  name,  or  it  may  have 
a  clear  image,  or  it  may  have  a  very  dim  image  of  the  hall,  but  such 
intrinsic  differences  in  the  image  make  no  difference  in  its  cognitive 
function.  Certain  extrinsic  phenomena,  special  experience  of 
cognition,  are  what  impart  to  the  image,  be  it  what  it  may,  its  know- 
ing office.  For  instance,  if  you  ask  me  what  hall  I  mean  by  my 
image  and  I  can  tell  you  nothing ;  or  if  I  fail  to  lead  you  towards  the 
Harvard  Delta,  or  if,  being  led  by  you,  I  am  uncertain  whether  the 
Hall  I  see  be  what  I  had  in  mind  or  not ;  you  would  rightly  deny  that 
I  had  'meant'  that  particular  hall  at  all,  even  though  my  mental 
image  might  to  some  degree  have  resembled  it."18 

It  is  evident  that  James  was  here  describing,  not  as  he  supposed 
cognition  or  forward-looking,  but  verification  or  backward-looking. 
He  held  that  fulfilment  of  meaning  is  cognition,  and  not  merely 
verification  as  he  should  have  held,  and  then  he  doubled  the  failure 
by  advancing  no  definition  of  meaning,  except  as  he  called  it  lead- 
ing or  "mental  pointing"  which  had  no  cognitional  value  until 
identified  with  truth.  He  said  of  an  idea  that,  if  fulfilled,  then  ' '  my 
soul  was  prophetic  and  my  idea  must  be  and  by  common  consent 
would  be  called  cognizant  of  reality. '  '19  If  this  statement  could  be 
taken  as  a  description  of  verification  only,  as  was  not  intended,  it  is 
one  with  the  genuinely  pragmatic  tenet  that  effective  leading  is  the 
test  of  truth. 

But  James  was  careful  to  establish  the  fact  that  he  was  using 
leading  as  the  functional  test  of  cognition.  He  said :  "  In  this  con- 
tinuing and  corroborating,  taken  in  no  transcendental  sense,  but  de- 
noting definitely  felt  transitions,  lies  all  that  the  knowing  of  a  percept 
by  an  idea  can  possibly  contain  or  signify.  Whenever  such  trans- 
itions are  felt,  the  first  experience  knows  the  last  one.  Whenever 
certain  intermediaries  are  given,  such  that,  as  they  develop  toward 

^Ibid.,  p.  55. 
is  Ibid.,  p.  56. 


10  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

their  terminus,  there  is  experience  from  point  to  point  of  one  di- 
rection followed  and  finally  of  one  process  fulfilled,  the  result  is  that 
their  starting  point  thereby  becomes  a  knower  and  their  terminus  an 
object  meant  or  known."20 

Evidently,  as  a  description  of  knowing,  this  again  raised  the 
vexed  question  of  objective  reference.  James  did  not  hold  consist- 
ently to  the  truly  pragmatic  conception  of  objective  reference  made 
intelligible  by  the  presence  of  the  future  as  a  present  quality  of  ob- 
jects, which  we  have  seen  him  expressing  in  his  reply  to  his  critic,  but 
instead  he  held  that  an  idea,  or,  as  he  sometimes  said,  an  experience, 
is  the  starting  point  of  knowledge,  that  there  are  intermediaries  in 
continuous  development  from  point  to  point,  that  there  is  a  definite 
direction  of  development,  and  finally  a  terminus,  which  is  the  object 
meant  or  known.  Now  witness  the  confusion  which  was  caused  by 
substituting  this  description  of  a  process  of  verification  or  fulfilment 
of  meaning  for  the  description  of  a  process  of  cognition  or  expecta- 
tion of  a  fulfilment  which  may  or  may  not  come.  James  said  that 
the  transition,  the  development  and  the  continuing  must  be  taken  in 
no  transcendental  sense,  but  simply  as  denoting  definitely  felt  trans- 
itions, relations  which  "unroll  themselves  in  time."  Then,  however, 
he  introduced  a  non-experiential  and  purely  transcendental  element 
by  saying  that  they  develop  toward  a  terminus,21  a  terminus,  by 
definition  not  yet  within  experience,  yet  guiding  experience ;  that  the 
development  has  a  direction — a  direction  given  by  the  object  still  out- 
side of  experience — and!  the  result  is  a  fulfilment,  an  end  intended 
from  the  first  but  known  only  when  reached.  James  completed  the 
confusion  by  saying  of  the  fulfilment,  that  the  starting  point  thereby 
becomes  a  knower  and  the  terminus  an  object  meant  or  known.  By 
completing  its  promise,  a  promise,  which  was  not  a  promise,  becomes 
a  promise.  And  then  once  more  James  distinctly  said  that  he  was 
not  talking  of  truth  but  of  cognition  for  he  said  that  when  the  ob- 
ject is  reached  "the  percept  here  not  only  verifies  the  concept, 
proves  its  function  of  knowing  that  percept  to  be  true,  but  the  per- 
cept's existence  as  the  terminus  of  the  chain  of  intermediaries  creates 
the  function.  Whatever  terminates  that  chain  was,  because  it  now 
proves  itself  to  be,  what  the  concept  'had  in  mind.'22 

James  was  not  blind  to  the  dilemma  involved  in  this  theory  of 
ohjective  reference  and  proposed  a  solution  for  it  which  unfortu- 

20  Ibid.,  p.  56. 

2i  Ibid.,  p.  57  et  seq. 

22  Ibid.,  pp.  60-61. 


JAMES'S  FORMULATION  OF  PRAGMATISM  11 

nately  takes  away  the  last  hope  of  interpreting  the  objective  refer- 
ence in  truly  functional  terms.  He  stated  the  dilemma  thus :  ' '  Can 
the  knowledge  be  there  before  those  elements  that  constitute  its  be- 
ing have  come?  And  if  knowledge  be  not  there,  how  can  objective 
reference  occur  ? '  '23  The  solution  he  found  in  a  distinction  between 
knowing  as  verified  and  completed  and  the  same  knowing  in  transit. 
This  knowledge  in  transit,  or  virtual  knowledge,  not  ' '  completed  and 
nailed  down"  constitutes,  he  said,  the  greater  part  of  our  knowing. 
"To  continue  thinking  unchallenged  is,  ninety-nine  times  out  of  a 
hundred,  our  practical  siibstitute  for  knowing  in  the  completed, 
sense.  As  each  experience  runs  by  cognitive  transition  into  the  next 
one,  and  we  nowhere  feel  a  collision  with  what  we  elsewhere  count 
as  truth  or  fact,  we  commit  ourselves  to  the  current  as  if  the  port 
were  sure."24 

The  difficulty  with  the  solution  for  the  dilemma  is  that  one  cannot 
discover  what  James  could  possibly  mean  by  ''virtual  knowledge." 
He  had  insisted  that  the  end  known  creates  the  function  of  knowing. 
Here  he  plainly  said  that  ninety-nine  times  out  of  a  hundred  the  end 
does  not  create  the  function.  However,  what  does  "create  the  func- 
tion" in  these  ninety-nine  exceptions  to  the  rule  James  did  not  and 
could  not  say.  At  this  point,  had  he  been  a  consistent  pragmatist. 
James  would  rightly  have  emphasized  the  functional  nature  of  the 
cognitive  relation.  But  he  said  not  a  word  at  this  crucial  point  of 
this  relation  of  simultaneous  stimulus  and  response  between  organism 
and  environment,  in  which  the  leading  is  done  by  the  future,  which, 
in  the  form  of  a  present  quality  of  the  environment,  shows  the  con- 
sequences of  possible  action. 

This  contrast  between  virtual  and  completed  knowledge  played 
an  important  part  throughout  James's  system.  It  is  the  same  idea 
which  appeared  in  the  contrast  which  he  made  between  conceptual 
and  perceptual  knowledge  or  what  he  calls  more  descriptively  still, 
"knowledge  about"  versus  "direct  acquaintance."  The  respective 
values  which  James  set  on  these  types  of  knowing  is  most  significant 
of  his  failure  to  be  pragmatic.  That  he  could  say  that  "knowledge 
as  direct  though  'dumb'  acquaintance  is  superior  to  knowledge 
about"25  places  him  among  the  dualists  who  find  in  sensations  a 
direct  revelation,  and  a  miraculous  as  well,  of  the  independent,  ex- 
ternal world.    He  said  also :  "it  is  always  the  speechlessness  of  sensa- 

zzlMd.,  p.  67. 

24  ma.,  p.  69. 

25  The  Meaning  of  Truth,  p.  39. 


12  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

tion,  its  inability  to  make  any  statement,  that  is  held  to  make  the 
very  notion  of  it  meaningless,  and  to  justify  the  student  of  knowl- 
edge in  scouting  it  out  of  existence.  .  .  .  But  in  this  universal  liquid- 
ation, this  everlasting  slip,  slip,  slip,  of  direct  acquaintance  into 
knowledge  about,  until  at  last  nothing  is  left  about  which  the  knowl- 
edge can  be  supposed  to  obtain,  does  not  all  significance  depart 
from  the  situation?"26 

Accordingly  an  interesting  difference  appears  between  the  at- 
titude which  James  took  toward  conceptional  and  perceptional  knowl- 
edge and  the  attitude  which  the  pragmatist  takes.  Since  James  had 
defined  knowledge  as  an  affair  of  leading,  the  spatial  metaphor  took 
its  tribute,  as  metaphors  will.  Perfect  knowledge,  accurate  and 
complete,  meant  closeness  of  approach  to  the  object,  an  actual  face- 
to-faceness.  This  was  "direct  acquaintance,"  also  perception,  also, 
sometimes,  sensation.  "Direct  knowledge,"  so  described,  became 
static,  a  mere  spectator,  and  "knowledge  about"  was  no  less  inher- 
ently static,  for  it  meant  simply  the  removal  of  thought  from  its 
object  by  a  series  of  static  mediating  acquaintances.  This  happened 
because  the  leading  became  for  James  a  mechanical  conception  with 
no  inner  spring  of  purpose.  This  the  pragmatist  supplies  by  in- 
terpreting the  leading  in  functional  or  instrumental  terms  freed 
from  the  spatial  metaphor.  He  says  that  knowing,  whether  per- 
ceptual or  conceptual,  means  that  some  part  of  the  organism's  en- 
vironment controls  or  directs  the  behavior  of  the  organism  in  a  new 
way,  meaning  by  new,  non-mechanical,  since  it  is  a  control  by  the 
future  as  an  experienced  quality  of  the  object. 

But  leaving  aside  the  pragmatic  solution  for  the  time,  we  find  that 
James's  theory  of  consciousness  as  leading  destroys  itself  at  either  of 
the  two  possible  turnings  on  its  road  to  reality.  James  said  that 
"knowledge  about"  is  a  stage  only  on  the  path  to  "direct  acquaint- 
ance" and  that  the  latter  corresponds  to  reality.  Correspondence 
he  explained  as  meaning  that  "direct  knowledge,"  if  valid,  will 
terminate  in  the  reality  meant.27  It  was  a  case  again  of  the  idea 
of  Memorial  Hall  leading  to  Memorial  Hall,  and  again  James  sub- 
stituted a  test  of  truth,  namely,  fulfilment  of  promise,  for  a  criterion 
of  the  presence  of  knowing,  the  proper  criterion  being,  as  a  prag- 
matist would  hold,  the  future  acting  in  the  present.  But  it  was 
more  serious  than  that,  for  what  becomes  of  a  thought  when  it 
reaches  reality?     Does  the  thought  of  Memorial  Hall  wait  outside 

ze  Ihid.,  pp.  13-14. 

27  Cf.  ibid.,  p.  17  et  seq. 


JAMES'S  FORMULATION  OF  PRAGMATISM  13 

on  the  doorstep  when  it  happily  "terminates  in"  Memorial  Hall?28 
We  must  reluctantly  admit  that  the  "mental  pointing"  and  "effec- 
tive leading"  prove  meaningless  even  for  purposes  of  verification, 
when  stated  as  James  proposed.  A  thought  can  not  approach  a 
thing;  it  can  not  "terminate  in"  an  object.  One  body  can  approach 
another,  and  a  thing,  through  its  meaning,  can  direct  a  conscious  or- 
ganism's approach.  The  church  bell  summons  to  prayer,  the  bugle 
calls  to  arms,  and  a  spring  day  invites  to  the  woods  and  hills.  But 
James  did  not  so  provide  for  the  functioning  of  the  object,  and  so 
missed  the  only  possible  basis  for  "the  effective  relationship"  in  con- 
sciousness. 

Some  one  may  well  object  that  it  is  a  misrepresentation  of  James 
to  ask  what  becomes  of  the  thought  of  Memorial  Hall  when  it  termin- 
ates in  the  reality,  because  James  had  already  answered  the  question 
in  such  a  way  as  to  avoid  representationism.  He  spoke,  as  we  saw 
in  the  beginning,  of  the  point  at  the  intersection  of  two  lines,  ap- 
pearing in  one  context  as  a  thing  and  in  another  as  a  thought,  and  by 
this  identity  of  thought  and  thing,  it  may  be  claimed  that  James  had 
set  himself  beyond  the  reach  of  all  criticism  to  which  an  unmodified 
dualism  is  subject.  But  this  is  the  point  under  discussion.  James 
tried  in  two  ways  to  establish  this  identity  and  failed  in  both.  We 
have  seen  what  became  of  his  test  of!  stability,  and  we  are  now  in  a 
position  to  see  the  dilemma  to  which  his  theory  of  consciousness  as 
ambulatory  brought  him.  For  having  defined  consciousness  as  a 
leading  toward  reality,  any  stage  of  the  process  before  the  reality 
was  reached  might  be  considered  a  more  or  less  perfect  representation 
of  the  object,  depending  upon  proximity,  but  the  absolute  termi- 
nation of  the  process  could  bring  only  unconsciousness,  and  not  con- 
sciousness. And  so  it  was  that  his  theory  set  him,  if  he  had  but 
known,  this  fruitless  choice:  direct  knowledge  was  either  an  un- 
mediated  mirroring  of  reality,  and  hence  representationism  and  dual- 
ism with  their  attendant  enigmas ;  or  else  direct  knowledge  was  un- 
consciousness, for  having  defined  consciousness  as  leading,  what 
terminated  the  process  would  terminate  the  consciousness  and  a  by- 

28  It  is  needless  to  say  that  for  the  consistent  pragmatist  this  question  does 
not  arise.  Insisting  as  he  does  that  a  thought  is  a  certain  functioning  of  the 
object  in  relation  to  the  body,  he  has  no  superfluous  tertium  quid  to  dispose  of, 
when  a  particular  function  has  been  performed.  He  needs  to  say  only,  that  the 
object  has  changed  and  the  body  is  responding  differently.  James  was  trying  to 
establish  just  such  a  functional  identity  of  thought  and  object,  but  mistook  the 
proper  method  of  proof. 


H  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

stander,  the  Absolute  once  more,  would  be  needed  to  recognize  the 
cognitive  quality  of  this  way  of  knowing. 

But  James,  it  must  be  confessed,  would  not  have  welcomed  this 
criticism,  for  he  felt  that  he  had  met  it  and  escaped  from  it  once  for 
all  by  his  doctrine  of  pure  experience.29  That  this  doctrine  could  not 
save  him  from  the  consequences  of  dualism,  moreover  that  it  further 
committed  him  to  them,  has,  I  think,  become  apparent  to  most  stu- 
dents of  James,  for  pure  experience  is  only  another  name  for  simple 
sensations. 

To  define  pure  experience  he  said  that  "the  instant  field  of  the 
present  is  always  experience  in  its  pure  state,  plain,  unqualified 
actuality,  a  simple  that,  as  yet  undifferentiated  into  thing  and 
thought  and  only  virtually  classifiable  as  objective  fact  or  as  some 
one's  opinion  about  a  fact."30  And  then,  as  we  saw,  James  used  the 
test  of  stability  to  break  pure  experience  apart  into  thoughts  and 
realities.  If,  however,  we  try  to  define  pure  experience  which  is  not 
yet  thought  and  not  yet  objective  reality,  the  sense  of  bewilderment 
grows  upon  us.  James  called  it  also  the  perceptual  order  and  the 
"immediate  flux  of  life,"31  but  he  elsewhere  tells  us  that  it  is  the 
essence  of  the  perceptual  order  to  stand  face-to-face  with  a  reality  in 
which  it  terminates.  Therefore  pure  experience  can  not  be  the  same 
as  the  perceptual  order,  and  it  is  a  confusion  to  say  so,  because  it  con- 
tains within  itself  in  undifferentiated  state  the  thought  and  the  re- 
ality thought-of,  whereas  James  had  made  it  the  essence  of  the  per- 
ceptual order  to  oppose  these  two. 

Moreover  pure  experience  with  all  its  self-sufficiency  is  in  flattest 
contradiction  to  the  conception  of  the  fringe,  wherein  the  struggle 
to  fill  the  "aching  gap"  is  all  important,  for  James  felt  that  the 
stream  of  pure  experience  yields  content  rather  than  problems  and 
he  warned  us  in  regard  to  our  thoughts  that:  "Only  in  so  far  as 
they  lead  us,  successfully  or  unsuccessfully,  back  into  sensible  ex- 

29  For  a  discussion  of  this  concept  cf.  Wendell  T.  Bush,  The  Empiricism  of 
James,  this  Journal,  Vol.  X.,  pp.  534-35,  537. 

so  Ibid.,  p.  74. 

si  Cf.  ibid.,  p.  93.  Here  in  speaking  of  pure  experience  as  a  feeling  of  a 
that  which  is  not  yet  a  what,  and  as  being  therefore  the  sort  of  experience  which 
only  new  born  babies  or  men  in  semi-coma  may  have  in  its  purity,  we  return 
to  the  point  of  view  of  the  Principles  of  Psychology  in  regard  to  sensation  and 
are  forced  to  recall  the  typical  experience  of  the  "child  new-born  in  Boston" 
and  the  italicized  statement  that  "Pure  sensation  can  only  be  realized  in  the 
earliest  days  of  life"  (Vol.  II.,  p.  7).  In  other  words  James  had  not  progressed 
as  far  from  his  earlier  views  as  he  himself  thought. 


JAMES'S  FORMULATION  OF  PRAGMATISM  15 

perience  again,  are  our  abstracts  and  universale  true  or  false  at 
all."32 

Thus,  at  this  final  point,  we  are  forced  to  conclude  that  once 
again  James  failed  to  see  the  proper  functional  nature  of  a  sug- 
gestive conception.  Had  he  been  able  to  identify  pure  experience  with 
the  dynamic  conception  of  the  fringe  as  a  that  which  is  indetermin- 
ate ;  is  in  need  of  reconstruction ;  is  concrete  in  the  sense  that  it  is  a 
concrete  problem;  and  is  indeed  "the  immediate  flux  of  life,"  out 
of  which  of  a  truth  come  distinctions  between  ideas  and  objects; 
then  James  might  have  escaped  dualism. 

Regretfully,  however,  we  are  forced  to  admit  that  James  failed 
to  reinterpret  dualism  as  a  satisfactory  philosophical  creed,  primarily 
because  he  slipped  over  the  real  problem  of  knowing  altogether, 
and  dealt  with  the  problem  of  verification,  which  he  mistook  for  it. 
Consequently  the  pragmatism  which  he  defined  is  not  an  adequate 
explanation  for  the  problem  of  knowledge,  but  is,  at  best,  as  he  him- 
self called  it,  a  new  name  for  traditional  ways  of  thinking.  More- 
over his  failure  came  because  he  did  not  hold  closely  enough  to  his 
own  statement  that  "our  present  is,  while  present,  directed  toward 
our  future." 

Yet,  notwithstanding  this,  we  must  not  lose  sight  of  his  im- 
measurable service  to  philosophy.  James's  suggestions,  with  all  the 
brilliancy  and  charm  of  their  execution,  did  much  to  foster  the 
"curious  unrest"  which  he  himself  noticed  in  the  philosophical  at- 
mosphere of  the  time;33  to  loosen  old  landmarks,  and  above  all,  to 
stimulate  the  many  students  of  philosophy  who  recognized  him  as  a 
leader  to  renewed  efforts  in  their  "unusually  obstinate  attempts  to 
think  clearly." 

32  ibid.,  p.  100. 

33  ibid.,  p.  39. 


CHAPTER   II 

The  Question  of  Truth 

IT  is  safe  to  say  that  nowhere  was  James  more  confused,  and  no- 
where has  he  been  more  eagerly  quoted  than  on  the  subject  of 
truth.  A  popular  notion  of  pragmatism,  gained  from  James,  has 
been,  and  is  still,  thalt  pragmatism  is  a  theory  of  truth,  and  that 
truth  is  "what  works."  It  is  under  this  guise  that  pragmatism  is 
generally  presented  from  the  pulpit  and  from  the  lecture  platform. 
This  is  not  a  misquotation  of  James  for  it  is  clearly  the  position  as- 
sumed repeatedly  in  the  three  well-known  volumes  of  essays :  Prag- 
matism (1907),  The  Meaning  of  Truth  (1909),  and  The  Will  to  Be- 
lieve (1912).  A  quotation  from  Dewey  will  show  at  once  wherein 
the  pragmatic  definition  of  truth  differs  from  this  blanket  assertion 
that  truth  is  that  which  works.  Dewey  saj^s:  "The  right,  the  true 
and  good  difference  is  that  which  carries  out  satisfactorily  the  specific 
purpose  for  the  sake  of  which  knowing  occurs.  All  manufactures 
are  the  product  of  an  activity,  but  it  does  not  follow  that  all  manu- 
factures are  equally  good.  And  so  all  'knowledges'  are  differences 
made  in  things  by  knowing,  but  some  differences  are  not  calculated 
or  wanted  in  the  knowing,  and  hence  are  disturbers  and  interlopers 
when  they  come — while  others  fulfil  the  intent  of  the  knowing,  being 
in  such  harmony  with  the  consistent  behavior  of  the  organism  as  to 
reinforce  and  enlarge  its  functioning."1 

The  reason  for  the  different  definitions  of  truth  given  by  James 
and  Dewey,  respectively,  lies  in  their  radical  difference  in  interpret- 
ing consciousness.  James  never  reached  a  dynamic  conception  of 
consciousness.  In  his  earlier  writing  consciousness  was  "the  faithful 
psychic  concomitant  of  changing  brain  states"  and  in  his  later  writ- 
ing it  was  "ambulatory"  still,  being  "the  instant  field  of  the  pres- 
ent" moving  from  point  to  point,  from  concept  to  concept  by  "defi- 
nitely felt  transitions."  There  is  no  dynamic  element  in  such  change. 
It  may  be  as  mechanical  a  process  as  digestion.  But  James  identi- 
fied anticipation  with  just  such  change  by  taking  the  position  of  a 
spectator,  and  reading  back  into  the  conscious  process,  as  the  essence 
of  anticipation,  the  fact  that  while  consciousness  is  at  each  moment 

1  Essays  Philosophical  and  Psychological  in  Honor  of  William  James,  p.  69. 

16 


THE  QUESTION  OF  TRUTH  17 

confined  to  "the  instant  field  of  the  present,"  this  field  moves,  and 
thus  the  future  is  constantly  becoming  the  present.  For  Dewey, 
consciousness  is  dynamic  because  of  a  very  different  interpretation 
of  anticipation.  For  if  one  would  speak  as  a  pragmatist  of  the  in- 
stant field  of  the  present  he  must  recognize  that  it  is  nothing  less 
than  an  organic  response  in  process  toward  some  future  consequence 
which  is  present  as  a  stimulus.  Thi,s  contrast  between  James  an  I 
pragmatism  must  be  sharply  drawn.  James  wrote  of  the  present 
moment  of  consciousness,  "the  specious  present,"  as  of  something 
which  a  spectator  could  regard  as  in  the  process  of  becoming  future, 
because  it  slips  along  an  abstraction  called  time,  as  the  concomitant 
of  changing  brain  states.  Dewey,  speaking  for  consistent  pragma-  I 
tists,  says  that  the  future  lives  within  the  present  as  meaning,  as  in-  I 
tention,  as  anticipation.  Since  for  an  ambulatory  consciousness, 
anything  which  any  successive  moment  holds,  is  as  much,  and  as 
little,  anticipated  as  anything  else,  James  had  to.  find  an  external 
standard  by  which  to  judge  of  things  as  true  or  false,  when  the  pres- 
ent should  arrive  within  the  bewildering  novelty  of  the  future.  He  ,•■ 
showed  his  pragmatic  spirit,  in  selecting  the  standard  of  use,  but  be- 
cause the  standard  was  external  to  his  theory  of  consciousness  he 
employed  it  too  widely.  It  failed  naturally  to  check  with  his  theory  . 
of  consciousness  or  to  be  checked  by  it.  But  for  a  pragmatist  with 
a  truly  dynamic  theory  of  anticipation,  the  standard  is  given  by  . 
consciousness  itself.  For  the  pragmatist  consciousness  implies  the 
anticipation  of  a  specific  future  and  the  consequent  adjustment 
toward  that  future.  Accordingly,  if,  when  the  future  comes,  it  ful- 
fils this  definite  anticipation,  then  the  adjustment  proves  smooth  and 
useful  and  Dewey  speaks  of  it  as  being  harmonious. 

James's  essay  on  The  Sentiment  of  Rationality  shows  the  result 
of  his  too  wide  application  of  the  standard  of  truth,  with  the  conse- 
quence that  the  question  of  truth  is  confused  with  the  question  of 
morality.  For  if  not  checked  by  specific  intentions,  the  useful  may 
as  easily  be  interpreted  as  that  which  is  emotionally  satisfying,  or 
ethically  satisfying  as  anything  else.  For  to  be  satisfying  in  any 
way  is  beyond  question  to  be  useful  in  some  sense.  And  upon  this 
ambiguity  the  argument  of  the  essay  rests. 

One  must  not  forget  that  in  the  first  place  by  rational  James 
meant  acceptable  as  true.  One  must  bear  that  in  mind  as  he  reads 
James's  summary  of  the  argument,  which  is  in  part  as  follows:  "No 
philosophy  will  permanently  be  deemed  rational  by  all  men,  which 
(in  addition  to  meeting  logical  demands)   does  not  to  some  degree 


\ 


18  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

pretend  to  determine  expectancy,  and  in  a  still  greater  degree  make 
a  direct  appeal  to  all  those  powers  of  onr  nature  which  we  hold  in 
highest  esteem."-  Earlier  in  the  essay  this  was  his  statement: 
"Well;  of  two  conceptions  equally  fit  to  satisfy  the  logical  demand, 
that  one  which  awakens  the  active  impulses,  or  satisfies  other  esthetic 
demands  better  than  the  other,  will  be  accounted  the  more  rational 
conception  and  will  deservedly  prevail."3 

I  am  tempted  here  to  an  aside,  for  one  can  not  help  recognizing 
in  these  quotations  a  very  just  description  of  James's  own  philosophy. 
He  tried  to  meet  logical  demands,  but  in  a  still  greater  degree  he 

,made  a  direct  appeal  to  "all  those  powers  of  our  nature  which  we 
hold  in  highest  esteem,"  and  one  must  pause  to  ask  thoughtfully, 
whether,  therefore,  his  philosophy  should  deservedly  prevail.  In  his 
Phi  Beta  Kappa  oration  on  James  in  19114  Koyce  answered  this 
question  with  an  emphatic  affirmative.  Such,  I  feel,  has  been  the 
customary  answer,  and  I  believe  that  it  is  an  answer  dangerous  for 
philosophy,  if  philosophy  is  to  remain,  as  James  defined  it  "an  un- 
usually obstinate  attempt  to  think  clearly."  For  this  answer  is  in 
accord  with  James's  claim  that  the  demands  which  can  justly  be 
made  of  a  philosophy  are,  specifically,  that  "it  must,  in  a  general 

\way  at  least,  banish  uncertainty  from  the  future"5  and  "it  must) 
define  the  future  congruously  with  our  spontaneous  powers." G    Not 

\for  a  moment  would  science  be  willing  to  accept  these  strictures 
upon  her  mode  of  advance.  The  scientist  tells  us,  often  until  we  are 
weary,  that  he  is  not  bound  to  please  any  one;  what  he  is  after  is  the 
truth !  The  standard  of  truth  does  not  differ  for  science  and  for 
philosophy,  although  James  urged  in  this  essay  that  we  must  accept 
that  philosophy  of  life  as  truest  which  'brings  the  most  satisfactory 
results,  taking  "satisfactory"  in  its  widest  sense. 

The  following  is  the  argument  which  he  made  for  this  claim  and 
we  must  grant  its  persuasiveness,  unless  we  see  its  ambiguity.  "If 
I  refuse  to  stop  a  murder  because  I  am  in  doubt  whether  it  be  not 
justifiable  homicide,  I  am  virtually  abetting  the  crime.  If  I  refuse 
to  bail  out  a  boat  because  I  am  in  doubt  whether  my  efforts  will  keep 
her  afloat  I  am  really  helping  to  sink  her.  If  in  the  mountain  preci- 
pice I  doubt  my  right  to  risk  a  leap,  I  actively  connive  at  my  de- 
struction.    He  who  commands  himself  not  to  be  credulous  of  God, 

2  The  Will  to  Believe,  etc.,  p.  110. 

3  Ibid.,  p.  76. 

4  Cf.  William  James  and  Other  Essays. 
s  Will  to  Believe,  etc.,  p.  77. 

olbid.,  p.  82. 


THE  QUESTION  OF  TRUTH  19 

of  duty,  of  freedom,  of  immortality  may  again  and  again  be  indis- 
tinguishable from  him  who  dogmatically  denies  them.  Scepticism  in 
moral  matters  is  an  active  ally  of  immorality.  AVho  is  not  for,  is 
against.  The  universe  will  have  no  neutrals  in  these  questions.  In 
theory,  as  in  practise,  dodge  or  hedge,  or  talk  as  we  like  about  a  wise 
scepticism,  we  are  really  doing  volunteer  military  service  for  one 
side  or  the  other."7 

In  each  instance  chosen  we  find  James  dealing  with  a  situation 
of  doubt,  the  doubtful  murder,  the  boat  which  may  float  or  may 
sink,  the  risk  of  the  leap  from  the  mountain  precipice,  and  the  ques- 
tions of  God,  of  duty,  of  freedom,  of  immortality.  James  meant 
these  as  genuinely  doubtful  situations,  in  which  you  can  not  foretell 
in  which  way  the  issue  will  turn,  but  situations  in  which  by  courage- 
ous action  you  may  turn  that  doubtfulness  into  victory  for  the  inter- 
est dearest  to  you.  Again  we  meet  James's  "head  for  risks  and 
sense  for  living  on  the  perilous  edge"  and  all  that  is  heroic  in  us 
rises  to  his  challenge  to  meet  him  on  this  dizzy  slope  of  valiant  effort, 
but  the  question  of  truth  he  has  not  raised.  James  was  dealing  not 
with  truth  but  with  morality.  Here  is  the  boat.  It  may  sink.  The 
truth  of  that  anticipation  we  are  not  in  a  position  to  test  experi- 
mentally beforehand.  There  are,  however,  moral  alternatives  before 
us.  Is  it  better  to  exert  ourselves,  quite  painfully  perhaps,  on  the 
chance  of  being  saved,  or  is  the  chance  worth  so  little  that  we  had 
better  enjoy  what  leisure  life  still  affords  us?  But  if  James  should 
add  triumphantly,  "Your  belief  that  the  boat  would  not  sink  saved 
it  from  sinking!  Belief  created  its  own  verification";  "Not  so,"  we 
could  reply,  "not  the  truth  of  our  belief  but  the  effectiveness  of  our 
bailing  kept  us  afloat ! ' ' 

That  belief,  which  is  lively  anticipation,  may  give  a  man  courage 
to  achieve  a  notable  victory  in  a  situation  of  unstable  organization  is, 
let  me  again  repeat,  a  proposition  in  ethics.  For  in  such  a  situation 
there  is  a  conflict  of  ends,  as,  for  example,  is  it  better  to  lie  back 
passively  and  take  what  comes?  or  is  it  better  to  exert  myself  to 
bring  What  I  wish  to  pass?  All  the  time,  however,  the  question  of 
truth  may  be  interwoven  with  this  larger  question  of  the  value  of 
effort.  For  instance,  the  question  of  truth  appears  in  this  form :  "If 
I  do  nothing  will  the  boat  sink,  as  it  now  looks  as  if  it  would?" 
And  the  answer  comes,  possibly  from  a  spectator:  "He  did  nothing 
and  the  boat  sank,"  or  "If  he  had  done  nothing  the  boat  would, have 
sunk,  for  it  was  fast  filling  with  water."     The  only  "working" 

TlMd.,  p.  109. 


20  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

which  one  can  identify  with  truth  in  this  case  is  that  the  anticipa- 
tion that  the  boat  would  or  would  not  sink  is  fulfiled.  The  larger 
"working"  of  this  anticipation,  if  it  leads  to  reconstructing  the 
conditions  on  a  more  desirable  basis,  is  still  guidance  by  the  future, 
but  with  the  question  of  desirable  or  undesirable  there  enters  the 
moral  question  of,  a  conflict  of  ends.  But  this  does  not  mean  that 
our  belief  must  define  the  future  congruously  with  our  desires — we 
should  be  woefully  betrayed  by  sinking  crafts  did  it  do  so,  neither 
must  we  take  as  literal  the  statement  that  the  belief  creates  its  own 
verification.  It  is  not  the  belief  that  a  certain  thing  is  true  which 
makes  it  true,  but  the  belief,  if  correct,  guides  conduct  effectively. 
If  our  faith,  or  lack  of  faith,  in  immortality  is  compared  to  our 
belief  that  the  boat  will  or  will  not  sink,  the  divergence  of  the  ques- 
tion of  truth  from  the  question  of  the  value  of  certain  modes  of 
conduct  becomes  even  more  apparent.  A  man  may  be  genuinely 
doubtful  whether  or  not  his  individual  life  will  survive  the  ship- 
wreck of  his  body,  and  yet  make  moral  decisions  daily  and  hourly 
until  that  very  moment  of  shipwreck  comes. 

The  course  which  James  took  was  to  say  that,  because  a  man's 
life  is  made  more  humanly  worthy  by  a  faith  in  immortality,  the 
belief,  m  so  far  forth,  is  true.  He  had  a  right  to  say  that  a  belief 
in  so  far  as  it  leads  to  desirable  conduct  is  morally  useful  and  emin- 
ently practical,  because  it  serves  social  ends.  This  is  so  tautological 
as  to  be  incontestable.  But  to  say  that  it  is  in  so  far  forth  true  as 
well,  is  to  make  truth  meaningless  in  contradistinction  to  goodness 
and  utility.  It  does  even  more.  It  culminates  in  a  defense  of 
irrationality,  for  this  essay  on  The  Sentiment  of  Rationality  unless 
accepted  as  an  essay  on  The  Sentiment  of  Morality,  and  as  such  valu- 
able, is  a  renunciation  of  reason.  It  is  this  because  it  contains  the 
emotional  demand  that  our  philosophy  must  define  the  future  con- 
gruously with  our  desires.  Such  has  been  the  dream  of  romanticists, 
haunted  by  visions  which  have  led  them  to  deny  the  rationality  of 
the  empirical  world  and  to  substitute  for  it  Utopian  visions  of  a 
golden  age,  "a  future  congruous  to  our  desires." 

Perhaps  the  errors  of  this  position  may  be  made  more  evident  by 
showing  how,  at  times,  James  used  the  consistent  pragmatic  defi- 
nition of  truth.  It  Was  to  be  expected  that  in  taking  truth  broadly 
las  that  which  works  he  would  include  within  that  conception  the 
obvious  case  in  which  the  working  consists  in  the  fulfilment  of  ex- 
pectation. And  beyond  a  doubt  James  expressed  that  view,  but  he 
failed  to  see  that  it  exhausted  the  truth  function  and  so  he  obscured 


THE  QUESTION  OF  TRUTH  21 

the  whole  question,  as  in  the  essay  just  considered,  by  adding  prac- 
tical consequences  which  were  foreign  to  the  problem. 

We  must  recall  James's  illustration  of  knowing  Memorial  Hall, 
as  given  in  the  essay  Does  Consciousness  Exist  f  He  supposed  that 
sitting  in  his  study  in  Cambridge  he  had  an  idea  of  Memorial  Hall. 
Then  he  proposed  to  test  this  idea.  He  concluded  that  unless  his 
idea  should  prove  able  to  lead  him  to  Memorial  Hall,  or  enable  him 
in  some  way  to  point  to  Memorial  Hall  and  say  "This  is  what  my 
idea  meant,"  it  was  open  to  question  whether  he  had  actually  had  an 
idea  of  Memorial  Hall.  The  idea  made  a  promise.  If  unfulfiled  or 
unfulfilable  he  said  one  could  rightly  doubt  whether  he  had  meant 
that  particular  hall  after  all.  In  the  essay  on  Knower  and  Known 
James  used  the  same  example  of  knowing  Memorial  Hall  and  signifi- 
cantly enough  the  adverb  "truly"  slipped  into  the  first  sentence. 
' '  Suppose  me  to  be  sitting  here  in  my  library  at  Cambridge,  at  ten 
minutes'  walk  from  'Memorial  Hall'  and  to  be  thinking  truly  of  the 
latter  object."8  Then  he  continued:  "If  in  its  presence  I  feel  my 
idea,  however  imperfect  it  may  have  been,  to  have  led  hither  and  to 
be  now  terminated,  .  .  .  why  then  my  soul  was  prophetic,  and  my  idea 
must  be,  and  by  common  consent  would  be,  called  cognizant  of  reality. 
That  percept  was  what  I  meant,  for  into  it  my  idea  has  passed  by 
conjunctive  experiences  of  sameness  and  fulfiled  intention.  Nowhere 
is  there  jar,  but  every  later  moment  continues  and  corroborates  an 
earlier  one."9  This,  by  the  way,  James  called  a  complete  descrip- 
tion of  knowing,  showing  that  he  confused  the  process  of  cognition 
with  the  process  of  verification. 

I  believe  that  James  nowhere  expressed  this  idea  of  truth  as  ful- 
filment of  promise  more  clearly  than  in  the  article  on  the  ' '  Notions 
of  Truth."  He  said:  "True  ideas  are  those  that  we  can  assimilate, 
validate,  corroborate  and  verify.  False  ideas  are  those  that  we  can- 
not. That  is  the  practical  difference  it  makes  to  us  to  have  true 
ideas ;  that,  therefore,  is  the  meaning  of  truth,  for  it  is  all  that  truth 
is  known  as. 

"This  thesis  is  what  I  have  to  defend.  The  truth  of  an  idea  is 
not  a  stagnant  property  inherent  in  it.  Truth  happens  to  an  idea. 
It  becomes  true,  it  is  made  true  by  events.  Its  verity  is  in  fact,  an 
event,  a  process,  the  process  namely  of  its  verifying  itself,  its  verifi- 
cation.    Its  validity  is  the  process  of  its  validation. 

"But  what  do  the  words  verification  and  validation  themselves 

s  The  Meaning  of  Truth,  p.  104. 
9  Ibid.,  p.  105. 


22  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

pragmatically  mean?  They  again  signify  certain  practical  conse- 
quences of  the  verified  and  validated  idea.  It  is  hard  to  find  any  one 
phrase  that  characterizes  these  consequences  better  than  the  ordinary 
agreement  formula — just  such  consequences  being  what  we  have  in 
mind  whenever  we  say  that  our  ideas  'agree'  with  reality.  They  lead 
us,  namely,  through  the  acts  and  other  ideas  which  they  instigate, 
into  or  up  to,  or  towards,  other  parts  of  experience  with  which  we 
feel  all  the  while — such  feeling  being  among  our  potentialities — that 
the  original  ideas  remain  in  agreement.  The  connections  and  transi- 
tions come  to  us  from  point  to  point  as  being  progressive,  harmonious, 
satisfactory.  This  function  of  agreeable  leading  is  what  we  mean 
by  an  idea's  'verification'  ".10 

I  wish  particularly  to  emphasize  the  difference  in  the  definiton 
of  "practical  consequences"  in  the  above  quotation  from  James's 
definition  of  "the  practical  consequences"  of  a  belief  in  the  Absolute, 
which  were  considered  as  proof  of  the  truth  of  the  idea,  in  so  far  as 
the  belief  granted  moral  holidays.  In  contrast  to  this  the  "prac- 
tical consequences"  just  mentioned  have  to  do  with  the  continuous, 
harmonious  and  satisfactory  adjustment  of  the  organism  to  the  en- 
vironment in  a  direction  intended.  It  means,  in  less  abstract  terms, 
that  a  man  understands  the  nature  of  the  world  in  which  he  is  living, 
and  acts  accordingly,  and  moreover  that  his  acting  by  its  smooth  ac- 
complishment proves  the  correctness  of  his  estimate  of  the  world. 
He  knows,  for  instance,  that  it  is  a  world  in  which  water  will  quench 
his  thirst,  food  satisfy  his  hunger,  sleep  renew  his  strength,  friends 
cheer  his  heart,  and  knowledge  give  him  added  power  over  nature. 
In  so  far  as  acting  upon  this  knowledge,  its  promises  are  met,  the 
knowledge  may  be  called  true ;  in  so  far  as  the  world  makes  a  promise 
which  it  does  not  keep,  so  that  when  the  person  trusts  himself  to  the 
promise,  he  finds  that  satisfactory  adjustment  is  impossible  in  the 
way  indicated,  error  enters,  and  the  knowledge  may  be  called  false. 

However,  this  essay  on  The  Notion  of  Truth  gives  striking  proof 
of  the  persistent  ambiguity  which  beset  James.  That  he  began  with 
the  pragmatic  conception  of  truth  as  the  fulfilment  of  intention  is 
evident,  but  in  the  course  of  a  few  pages  this  definition  of.  truth  was 
identified  with  his  dominant  idea  of  the  true  as  the  useful  in  an 
unrestricted  sense.  He  wrote  :  ' '  Agreement  thus  turns  out  to  be  es- 
sentially an  affair  of  leading — leading  that  is  useful  because  it  is  into 
quarters  that  contain  objects  that  are  important."11     In  this  fashion 

10  Pragmatism,  pp.  201,  202. 
ii  Ibid.,  p.  215. 


THE  QUESTION  OF  TRUTH  23 

James  has  brought  us  back  once  more  to  a  consideration  of  truth  as 
that  which  gives  emotional  satisfaction.  Again  he  has  strayed  from 
the  narrow  pragmatic  path  where  truth  means  the  fulfilment  of 
anticipations,  to  wander  in  a  pathless  place  where  truth  means  the 
achievement  of  consequences  which  are  useful  but  are  not  originally 
intended. 

It  is  with  an  understanding  of  this  distinction  that  one  should 
read  his  essay  on  "The  Will  to  Believe."  To  begin  with,  his  prob- 
lem was  artificial,  because  he  had  abruptly  severed  the  future  from 
the  present.  He  asked  us  to  suppose  that  it  is  just  as  genuinely 
possible  that  any  one  religious  creed  is  as  true  as  another,  and  this 
he  called  a  "living  option"  but  he  proceeded  to  make  it  a  blind 
option,  one  which  could  not  be  decided  on  intellectual  grounds.12 
To  illustrate  James's  meaning,  against  the  belief  that  there  is  a  God, 
one  may  place  the  belief  that  there  is  no  God.  If  we  have  here  a 
"living  option,"  a  case  of  genuine  doubt,  and  of  that  case  alone 
James  was  speaking,  then  nothing  in  the  universe  up  to  date  would 
support  either  creed,  and  within  themselves  the  creeds  would  contain 
no  suggestions  which  could  be  "checked  up"  in  any  "intellectual" 
way.  It  is  as  if  a  child  stood  before  another  child  saying:  "Which 
hand  will  you  take?"  In  one  hand  is  an  apple  while  in  the  other 
there  is  nothing,  (but  the  child  to  choose  has  no  evidence  which  is 
wThich.  All  he  knows  is  that  in  one  ease  he  will  be  sorry,  in  the  other 
glad.  He  may,  if  he  is  a  normal,  healthy  child  and  not  too  scrupulous 
of  the  game,  resort  to  a  "passional  decision"  of  getting  the  apple  at 
all  costs.  This  is  what  James  did,  and  he  called  it,  not  snatching 
the  apple,  but  arriving  at  the  truth. 

For  James  held  that  if  the  truth  of  rival  creeds  can  not  be 
decided  intellectually,  a.  man  has  the  right  to  throw  the  weight  of  his 
action  on  the  side  which  he  would  like  to  see  prevail.  Who  will  deny 
this  moral  right  which  James  defended  so  ably  ?  Surely  no  courage- 
ous heart.  But  the  question  remains  whether  we  can  accept  James's 
statement  of  the  ease  as  a  fair  description  of  a  "  living  option, ' '  and 
in  the  second  place  whether,  if  a  "living  option"  is  what  he  claimed 
Ave  can  accept  his  definition  of  truth  as  the  attainment  of  emotionally 
satisfactory  results.  Taking  the  second  question  first,  I  have  al- 
ready indicated  why  pragmatism  can  not  use  truth  as  coextensive 
with  utility. 

In  regard  to  the  first  problem,  the  question  of  the  "living  option'' 
itself,  offers  a  striking  parallel  to  the  situation  proposed  for  solution 

12  Vide,  The  Will  to  Believe,  p.  11. 


24  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

in  The  Dilemma  of  Determinism.  There  too,  James  assumed  a 
"living  option."  He  said  that  he  might  equally  well  choose  to  go 
home  by  either  of  two  streets,  and  since  in  attractiveness  the  streets 
were  equal,  a  "free"  act  of  volition  could  alone  start  him  homeward 
by  way  of  either  street.  In  The  Will  to  Believe  the  bifurcations  were 
creeds,  instead  of  streets.  But  The  Merchant  of  Venice  offers  us  a 
more  accurate  description  of  a  situation  of  choice  than  is  to  be  found 
in  James's  description  of  these  featureless  alternatives. 

Shakespeare  did  not  find  it  necessary  to  represent  a  scene  of 
"living  option"  by  having  Portia's  suitors  brought  blindfolded  be- 
fore the  caskets,  knowing  only  that  the  choice  of  the  casket  with 
Portia's  portrait  would  bring  untold  happiness.  Desirable  as  that 
prize  was,  it  could  have  given  the  suitors  no  clue  as  to  which  one  of 
the  three  caskets  would  bring  its  fulfilment.  The  actual  scene  is 
very  different.  The  suitors  use  their  eyes.  The  caskets  have  their 
legends.  They  are  of  different  metals:  of  gold,  of  silver,  of  lead, 
Each  suitor  speaks  of  the  promise  or  the  threat  which  he  sees  in  the 
objects  between  which  he  must  choose.  Portia,  in  jest,  suggests  that 
if  an  ill-favored  suitor  should  be  about  to  choose  the  casket  with  her 
portrait,  a  deep  glass  of  wine  upon  some  other  casket  would  turn  his 
choice  to  that.  She  would  increase  the  promises  and  suggestions  made 
to  this  hapless  man  by  the  gold  and  silver  caskets.  When,  too,  Bas- 
sanio  comes  to  the  trial,  Portia  has  no  need  to  tell  him  that  it  would 
be  useful,  or  desirable,  or  agreeable  even,  for  him  to  choose  the  casket 
with  her  portrait.  He  is  fully  awTare  of  that,  and  his  anxious  con- 
cern is  with  the  truth  of  the  pretension  of  the  rival  caskets  to 
further  that  end.  Portia  has  sweet  music  sung  which  suggests  to 
him  the  falseness  of  apparent  worth,  and  in  so  doing  she  helps  him 
to  the  truth  by  adding  to  the  suggestions  made  by  the  situation. 

Thus,  in  this  familiar  scene  there  is  a  more  accurate  presentation 
of  a  truth-situation,  than  in  the  "living  option"  James  proposed. 
To  the  question,  "What  shall  I  believe?"  there  is  but  one  answer, 
"That  depends  upon  the  nature  of  the  alternatives."  If,  for  in- 
stance, the  idea  of  immortality  bears  a  promise  which  experience 
fulfils,  then  we  may  rightly  call  it  true.  If  the  other  alternative  is 
the  one  which  becomes  verified  by  all  the  tests  of  truth  within  ex- 
perience, then  it  is  worthy  of  belief.  For  just  as  it  is  a  thoroughly 
artificial  problem  to  erect  as  a  symbol  of  choice  two  streets  which  are 
rivals  only  in  their  strict  neutrality  before  the  free  agent,  so  it  is 
equally  artificial  to  consider  two  contrary  beliefs  as  equally  pos- 
sible from  the  standpoint  of  truth.    When  such  a  situation  of  doubt 


THE  QUESTION  OF  TRUTH  25 

does  occur  freedom  comes  not  in  maintaining  the  deadlock  of  equal 
stimuli  but  in  finding  in  the  object  a  new  stimulus  to  end  the  inac- 
tivity, and  truth  enters  not  with  keeping  the  alternatives  meaning- 
less, but,  on  the  contrary,  in  discovering  other  and  more  adequate 
meanings  which  shall  explain  more  and  more  simply  the  data  in 
hand.  Whether  or  not  a  belief  is  true  and  is  worthy  of  credence,  de- 
pends therefore  not  upon  any  emotional  satisfaction  which  accom- 
panies the  belief,  but  solely  upon  whether  or  not  the  promises  of  the 
object  of  belief  are,  or  may  'be,  fulfiled  within  experience. 

But  some  one  may  object  that  this  is  to  forget,  as  James  did  not, 
that  faith  is  the  substance  of  things  hoped  for,  the  evidence  of 
things  not  seen  and  that  precisely  because  the  promises  of  the  object 
of  faith  can  not  be  fulfiled  within  experience,  we  have  the  right  to 
believe  as  true,  whatever  will  produce  the  best  results.  This  objec- 
tion, it  is  to  be  feared,  rests  still  upon  a  misunderstanding.  Faith 
and  belief  are  not  mysterious  faculties  which  enter  where  knowledge 
ends.  They  are  simply  affirmations,  generally  with  emotional  color- 
ing, of  the  truth  or  falsity  of  propositions.  But  when  the  proposi- 
tions which  they  affirm  can  not  be  ' '  checked  up ' '  within  experience, 
as  truth  must  be,  they  have  not  on  that  account  the  right  to  go  be- 
yond experience,  to  find  another  test  of  truth,  nor  yet  to  apply  the 
wider  test  of  utility  within  experience. 

Beyond  doubt  this  raises  grave  questions,  since  the  search  for 
truth  is  entangled  here  with  emotional  demands.  If  the  belief  in 
question  is  faith  in  immortality,  tradition  and  affection  and  habit 
must  often  first  be  answered  before  one  can  come  to  the  questions  of 
truth  at  all.  But  when  we  do  come  to  the  question  of  truth  we  must 
ask  first  of  all  what  the  belief  in  immortality  means,  and  then 
whether  that  meaning  is  consonant  with  experience.  There  is  also 
the  question  of  whether  it  is  true  that  such  a  belief  does  bring  cer- 
tain desirable  results.  And  if  it  does  bring  these  results,  is  it  true 
that  they  are  the  best  results  ?  For  the  pragmatic  definition  of  truth 
is  a  corollary  to  the  pragmatic  definition  of  consciousness.  As  con- 
sciousness is  behavior  guided  by  the  anticipation  of  consequences,  so 
truth  signifies  that  the  activity  so  guided  does,  or  may,  reach  the 
end  intended. 

A  pragmatist,  then,  can  not  accept  James's  definition  of  truth  as 
it  appears  in  the  thesis  of  The  Will  to  Believe.  James,  it  will  be  re- 
membered, said:  "Our  passional  nature  not  only  lawfully  may,  but 
must,  decide  an  option  between  propositions,  whenever  it  is  a  genuine 
option  that  can  not  by  its  nature  be  decided  on  intellectual  grounds; 


26  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

for  to  say,  under  such  circumstances,  'Do  not  decide,  hut  leave  the 
question  open,'  is  itself  a  passional  decision,  just  like  deciding  yes  or 
no — and  is  attended  with  the  same  risk  of  losing  the  truth.' nz  He 
must  object  in  the  first  place  to  James's  use  of  "living  option"  as  an 
inaccurate  description  of  the  situation  of  choice,  for  he  holds  that 
instead  of  blank  alternatives  to  be  taken,  not  for  their  intrinsic 
worth,  but  because  of  a  prize  which  is  to  be  added  to  one  of  them, 
without  changing  its  character  of  blankness — a  curious  contradic- 
tion— that  a  "living  option"  means  that  there  is  a  genuine  problem 
for  investigation.  Each  alternative  is  worthy  of  examination,  for 
each  is  full  of  hints  and  promises  of  fulfilment.  Either  may  be  true. 
As  a  scientist  tests  his  hypothesis,  so  must  every  seeker  after  relig- 
ious truths,  fearlessly,  honestly  test  his  alternatives.  If  neither  can 
be  fully  verified  within  a  lifetime,  or  within  centuries,  or  within  hu- 
man experience,  yet  so  long  as  they  are  "living  options"  just  so  long 
the  honest  man  who  wishes  truth  is  under  an  obligation  to  be  open- 
minded.  It  may  be  he  will  never  know,  it  may  be  that  "the  gulfs 
will  wash  him  down"  but  in  the  meantime  there  are  the  countless 
vital  truths  of  daily  life,  which  challenge  that  equal  temper  of  heroic 
hearts,  ' '  To  do,  to  strive,  to  dare,  and  not  to  yield. ' ' 

James  said:  "The  'scientific  proof  that  you  are  right  may  not  be 
clear  before  the  day  of  judgment  (or  some  stage  of  being,  which  that 
expression  may  serve  to  symbolize),  is  reached.  But  the  faithful 
fighters  of  this  hour,  or  the  beings  that  then  and  there  will  represent 
them,  may  then  turn  to  the  faint-hearted,  who  here  declined  to  go 
on,  with  words  like  those  with  which  Henry  IV.  greeted  the  tardy 
Crillon,  after  a  great  victory  had  been  gained:  "Hang  yourself, 
brave  Crillon!    "We  fought  at  Arques  and  you  were  not  there!"14 

Exactly !  Lack  of  definite  and  final  knowledge  does  not  benumb 
moral  endeavor,  as  too  many  moralists  have  insisted.  Too  many 
have  told  us  that  the  nerve  of  moral  effort  is  cut,  unless  we  know 
beforehand  that,  in  the  end,  the  good  will  win.  James  saw  more 
dearly  that  the  very  doubtfulness  of  the  issue  spurs  the  strenuous 
man  to  his  best  achievement,  and  that  to  be  out  of  the  conflict,  and 
to  take  no  share  in  the  danger,  is  to  be  truly  ignoble.  But  James  lost 
this  insight  when  he  made  obscure  the  distinction  between  the  good 
and  the  true.  A  very  bad  thing  may  be  true — many  very  bad  things 
are  true.  Sickness,  vice,  "Brocton"  murders,  defeats  are  facts  to  be 
reckoned  with  in  our  world.    Science,  disdaining  to  define  the  future 

13  The  Will  to  Believe,  p.  11. 
i*Ibid.,  p.  62. 


THE  QUESTION  OF  TRUTH  27 

congruously  with  our  desires,  does  nevertheless  strive  to  ascertain 
the  truth  about  the  present,  asking  what  sickness,  vice,  murders  and 
defeats  mean,  with  the  purpose  to  direct  the  slow  and  painful  and 
heroic  process  of  making  the  future  congruous  with  our  desires. 
Philosophy,  like  science,  must  disdain  to  define  the  future  congru- 
ously with  our  desires  and  must  instead  dispassionately  discover  the 
truth  about  the  actual  relation  of  man  to  his  world.  What  does  life 
mean?  What  does  consciousness  mean?  What  further  light  does 
our  knowledge  of  the  nature  of  consciousness  throw  upon  the  prob- 
lems of  the  will,  of  instinct,  of  immortality?  And  finally  in  what 
manner  and  to  what  extent  are  these  meanings  verified  by  fulfilment 
within  experience  ? — such  are  the  outlines  of  some  of  the  broad  ques- 
tions of  truth  with  which  philosophy  must  deal. 

I  have,  so  far,  hardly  touched  upon  James 's  service  to  philosoph- 
ical thought  in  exposing  the  error  of  "Truth"  with  a  capital  "T," 
by  consistently  maintaining  that  there  is  no  such  Truth,  but  that 
there  exists  instead  a  pluralism  of  truths,  which  are  particular  and 
relative  to  definite  situations.  Abstract  "Truth,"  pictured  as  the 
agreement  of  the  mind  with  reality,  received  at  his  hands  a  thrust  of 
inimitable  satire,15  yet  it  can  not  be  denied  that  James  never  quite 
cleared  his  skirts  of  a  very  similar  copy  theory  of  knowledge  with 
its  corollary  of  truth  as  the  agreement  between  an  idea  and  a  thing. 
One  finds  this  in  the  dialogue  with  which  James  closed  the  volume  on 
The  Meaning  of  Truth.  He  said  that  while  the  absolutist  sees  three 
distinct  entities,  "the  reality,  the  knowing  and  the  truth,"  he  as  a 
pragmatist  could  see  but  two,  namely,  the  reality  and  what  it  is 
known  as,  and  truth  is  only  another  name  for  the  knowing  of  reality, 
or  as  he  repeatedly  said16  truth  is  the  agreement  of  our  ideas  with 
reality. 

This  dualism  was  most  explicit  in  the  answer  which  James  made 
to  Professor  Pratt :  "Experience  leads  us  ever  on  and  on,  and  objects 
and  our  ideas  of  objects  may  both  lead  to  the  same  goal.  The  ideas 
being  in  that  case  shorter  cuts,  we  substitute  them  more  and  more 
for  their  objects ;  and  we  habitually  waive  direct  verification  of  each 
one  of  them,  as  their  train  passes  through  our  mind,  because  if  an 
idea  leads  as  the  object  would  lead,  we  can  say,  in  Mr.  Pratt's  words, 
that  in  so  far  forth  the  object  is  as  we  think  it,  and  that  the  idea, 
verified  thus,  in  so  far  forth  is  true  enough."17 

is  Vide,  Pragmatism,  pp.  234-235. 

i6  Vide,  The  Meaning  of  Truth,  preface,  p.  v. 

17  Ibid.,  p.  167. 


28  WILLIAM  JAMES  AND  PRAGMATISM 

Then,  once  having  made  the  mistake  of  separating  the  idea  from 
the  object,  which  as  a  pragmatist,  he  should  not  have  done,  James 
was  unable  to  show  even  by  his  many  essays  (1)  how  an  object  would 
"lead"  apart  from  an  idea,  (2)  how  an  idea  can  lead  apart  from  an 
object,  and  (3)  how,  on  this  assumption,  verification  can  mean  any- 
thing other  than  static  copying  of  a  meaningless  object  by  an  idea, 
which  (a)  is  meaningful  and  so  fails  to  copy  the  object  faithfully, 
or  (&)  is  exactly  like  the  object  and  so  meaningless.18 

Moreover  this  separation  of  the  idea  from  the  object  is  but 
another  aspect  of  the  separation  of  the  future  from  the  present,  with 
a  criticism  of  which  error,  this  study  of  James's  doctrine  of  truth 
was  begun.  There  I  showed  that  for  lack  of  the  criterion  of  specific 
meaning  James  identified  truth  with  the  larger  category  of  utility.  | 
Approaching  truth  from  the  side  of  the  separation  of  idea  from  ob- 
ject the  result  is  the  same.  For  James  spoke  of  true  ideas  as  those 
which  have  the  practical  value  of  terminating  in  objects  which  are 
' '  worth  while. ' '  For  failing  to  use  the  particular  standard  of  truth 
supplied  by  the  object,  because  he  held  the  idea  apart  from  the  ob- 
ject, he  supposed  that  the  particular  standard  must  be  given  in 
terms  of  consequences  to  the  agent.    Accordingly  he  wrote : 

"If  I  am  lost  in  the  woods,  and  starved,  and  find  what  looks  like 
a  cow-path,  it  is  of  the  utmost  importance  that  I  should  think  of  a 
human  habitation  at  the  end  of  it,  for  if  I  do  so,  and  follow  it,  I  save 
myself.  The  true  thought  is  useful  here  because  the  house,  which  is 
its  object,  is  useful."  On  the  following  pages  this  concrete  example 
is  generalized.  "From  this  simple  cue  (that  true  ideas  are  useful) 
pragmatism  gets  her  general  notion  of  truth  as  something  essentially 
bound  up  with  the  way  in  which  one  moment  in  our  experience  may 
lead  us  toward  other  moments  which  it  will  he  worth  while  to  have 
been  led  to.  Primarily,  and  on  the  common-sense  level,  the  truth  of 
a  state  of  mind  means  this  function  of  a  leading  that  is  worth 
while.  "19^ 

Again  contrast  with  this  what  the  pragmatist  means,  if  he  is  con- 
sistent, when  he  says  the  truth  is  what  works ;  namely,  that  the  antic- 
ipations aroused  in  him  by  the  object  are  fulfiled.  Truth  means 
for  him,  that,  when  questioned,  some  experience  has  made  a  promise 
and  that  the  promise  has  been  kept.  Truth  is  practical  in  the  sense 
that  an  object  permits  one  to  "bank"  on  its  promises.  Truth  again 
is  satisfaction,  not  because  an  object  fulfils  emotional  demands,  but 
because  it  fulfils  the  letter  of  its  contract. 

is  Vide,  especially  ibid.,  p.  166,  and  preface,  p.  xi. 
™  Pragmatism,  pp.  203,  204,  205. 


THE  QUESTION  OF  TRUTH  29 

Is  it  true  that  it  will  rain?  That  cloud  looks  threatening.  The 
rain  comes.  The  truth  of  the  rain-promising  aspect  of  the  cloud  is 
proved.  That  a  picnic  is  spoiled  and  that  crops  are  saved  are  facts 
irrelevant  to  the  truth  or  falsehood  of  the  original  meaning.  It  was 
because  James  lost  sight  of  the  function  of  the  object  in  the  truth 
situation  that  he  failed  to  keep  to  this  pragmatic  interpretation. 
Furthermore  by  merging  truth  in  the  conception  of  utility  in  its 
widest  sense,  he  lost  the  distinction  between  truth  and  goodness. 
Yet  it  was  not  strange  that  his  understanding  of  truth  was  imper- 
fect, for  he  worked  it  out  consistently  with  his  theory  of  conscious- 
ness, and  so  shows,  but  in  one  case  the  more,  how  far  reaching  are 
the  errors  attendant  upon  a  false  definition  of  knowledge. 


VITA 

The  writer  was  born  July  25,  1887,  in  Windsor,  Wisconsin.  She 
was  graduated  from  Milwaukee-Downer  Seminary  in  1904  and  from 
the  University  of  Wisconsin,  with  the  degree  of  Bachelor  of  Arts, 
in  1908.  During  the  year  1913-1914  she  was  a  scholar  in  philosophy 
at  the  University  of  Wisconsin  and  received  the  degree  of  Master  of 
Arts  in  June,  1914.  During  the  years  1914-1916  she  was  a  fellow- in 
philosophy  at  the  University  of  Illinois.  At  the  University  of  Wis- 
consin she  had  courses  in  philosophy  with  Professor  E.  B.  McGilvary, 
Professor  F.  C.  Sharp,  Professor  M.  C.  Otto  and  Dr.  H.  M.  Kallen, 
and  at  the  University  of  Illinois  with  Professor  A.  H.  Daniels  and 
Professor  B.  H.  Bode. 


14  DAY  USE 

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